The Conservative Party Leadership Battle

Oman’s Role in Mediating Middle Eastern Conflicts

A Weekly Political News Magazine

Tension in the Gulf Appears to Peak, with Slight Indications of a Thaw

A Weekly Political News Magazine

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Issue 1750 - May - 31/05/2019

I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream

Issue 1750 - May - 31/05/2019

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The Conservative Party Leadership Battle www.majalla.com

Editorial Theresa May’s announcement of her resignation has caused a new stir in the already divided sphere of Brexit Britain. Now that her departure is confirmed, a leadership contest is going to be held in early June, which will result in a new Prime Minister by the following July. In spite of her decision, many Brexiters and Tories argue that she should have taken the decision months ago, as now the new Prime Minister will have the monumental task of renegotiating a deal by the end of October. This week’s issue of Majalla explores the implication’s that Theresa May’s resignation will have on British politics, as the entire Brexit situation grows messier by the day.

The first cover story by Yasmine El Geressi delves into the Tory leadership contest and the writer gives a brief overview of the leading candidates and expected candidates. The writer lists each candidate’s parliamentary and ministerial experiences, their stances on Brexit and whether or not the candidate backs the prospect of a no-deal Brexit.

The writer ends with an outline of the divide the Tories have over no-deal, as leading candidates, namely Boris Johnson and Dominic Raab, back leaving Europe with or without a deal, meanwhile a “Stop Boris” group emerges from the party opposing the former Foreign Secretary and any other candidate who backs a no-deal.

Ali El Shamy writes the second cover story which explores how British politics as a whole might fare after Theresa May’s resignation.

The writer first notes the current divide within the Tory party and how this divide has caused it to lose public support, particularly from Brexiter Tory voters. The writer also explores how current Tory weakness might pave the way for a Corbyn government if a general election is called, however, it is unlikely that any party will command a majority in parliament and both would probably have to form a coalition government in the event of their respective victories.

Joseph Braude writes on the latest installment of the US-Iran escalation saga. Recently the US has dispatched additional troops to the Middle East to strengthen US Central Command defenses in the region. In spite of this, both the US and Iran have come out and said that they do not pursue war. Moreover, the Trump administration even stated that it does not seek regime change in Iran and that it wants to seek out a new deal with Iran. It now appears that there is an ease of tensions, which both sides have claimed as a victory for themselves.

Dennis Ross writes on the apparent ease of tensions between Iran and the US and warns that Iran will still likely carry out attacks on US interests via proxies. He also states that the US and its Gulf allies should now hold talks exchanging their respective policies toward Iran.

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A Weekly Political News Magazine

46 Saudi Arabia’s Buzzing Visual Arts Scene

Issue 1750- May - 31/05/2019

20 Iran’s Possible Covert Tactics

What Theresa May’s Resignation Means

14 for British Domestic Politics

32 26 This Is Not a Great-Power Competition

30 Demystifying Belt and Road

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50 Struggling to Sleep at Night?

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Nine-year-old Keeley Frank holds some stuffed animals her grandparents Al and Barb Scheidegger (at left) salvaged from their storage unit on May 2019 ,23 in Jefferson City, Missouri. It was among many units destroyed by a tornado there on Thursday. A series of powerful tornadoes killed at least three people in southwestern Missouri causing extensive damage in Jefferson City. (Getty)

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Queues of mountain climbers line up to stand at the summit of Mount Everest. Many teams had to stand for hours, risking frostbites and altitude sickness, as a rush of climbers marked one of the busiest days on the world’s highest mountain.

Eleven climbers have died on Everest this season, many while descending from the congested summit during only a few windows of good weather. (Getty)

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Saudi Arabia Seeks Arab Unity Over Iran After Attacks

leaders in Mecca, both due for late night, would discuss Shi’ite Iran’s “interference” in Arab affairs.

Arab leaders arrived in Saudi Arabia on Thursday for emergency summits that Riyadh hopes will deliver a strong message to Iran that regional powers will defend their interests against any threat after attacks on Gulf oil assets this month. Saudi and the United Arab Emirates have said they want to avoid war after drone strikes on oil pumping stations in the kingdom and the sabotage of oil tankers off the UAE coast. Riyadh accused Tehran of ordering the drone strikes, which were claimed by Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthi group. A top U.S. security official said Iranian mines were “almost certainly” used in the tanker operation. Tehran denies any involvement. Saudi Foreign Minister Ibrahim alAssaf told a gathering of his counterparts in Jeddah ahead of the summits that the attacks must be addressed with “strength and firmness”. He said the meetings of Sunni Muslim Gulf leaders and Arab

Israel Faces Fresh Poll as Netanyahu Fails to Form Government Israeli lawmakers voted to dissolve parliament on Thursday, paving the way for a new election after veteran Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu failed to form a coalition government before a midnight deadline. Netanyahu preferred a new ballot, set for Sept. 17, to the alternative, under which Israeli President Reuven Rivlin could have asked another politician to try and form a ruling coalition.The election, Israel’s second this year after an April 9 poll in which Netanyahu claimed victory, means unprecedented upheaval even for a country used to political infighting. “We will win,” Netanyahu, head of the right-wing Likud party, vowed after parliament voted for a fresh election when the deadline expired for him to assemble his fifth

government.

Top Militant Suspect Transferred to Egypt from Eastern Libya Top Egyptian militant suspect Hisham al-Ashmawy was transferred to Egypt from eastern Libya in a military aircraft, Egyptian state television said on Wednesday. Ashmawy, a former Egyptian special forces officer, was apprehended in the Libyan city of Derna late last year and has been long sought by Cairo on charges of orchestrating a deadly desert ambush on police and other high-profile attacks.

At least two private Egyptian television channels showed live footage of the military aircraft landing in Cairo airport and a presenter climbed inside to film a blindfolded and ear-muffed Ashmawy.

“You’re in Egypt, Hisham,” the anchor said as an intelligence officer removed the ear-muffs.

“Welcome back.” Another unidentified detainee could also be seen handcuffed, blindfolded and ear-muffed. Two intelligence sources told Reuters the man was Safwat Zeidan, Ashmawy’s personal guard.

France Says it Opposes Death Penalty as Four French Sentenced in Iraq France opposes the death penalty in principle but accepts Iraqi sovereignty, its foreign ministry said on Monday, as a fourth French citizen was sentenced to death in Iraq for being part of ISIS. Iraqi court officials said the man had been sentenced on Monday to death by hanging, a day after three other Frenchmen were given death sentences for Islamic State membership. They can appeal against their convictions. The French foreign ministry said

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the ISIS members “had to answer for their crimes” but stated France’s opposition to the death penalty.

“The French embassy in Iraq, in its role as provider of consular protection, is taking the necessary steps to convey its position to the Iraq authorities,” the statement added. The four convicted men were handed to Iraqi authorities in February by the U.S-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), part of a group of 280 Iraqi and foreign detainees that military sources said at the time included 14 French citizens.

president or filing sealed charges, telling reporters it was “not an option we would consider.” But he also said his two-year investigation did not clear Trump of improper behaviour and, while he did not use the word “impeachment,” he pointed out there were other ways to hold presidents accountable.

U.S. President Donald Trump reacted swiftly to Mueller’s statement saying nothing had changed and “the case is closed!” “There was insufficient evidence and therefore, in our Country, a person is innocent,” Trump wrote in a Twitter post. “The case is closed!”

Conservative Party’s largely pro-Brexit membership who will decide the outcome of the contest, several of the leadership hopefuls have said Britain must leave the EU on Oct. 31 even if this means a no-deal Brexit. One of the candidates, Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt, said it would be “political suicide” to pursue a no-deal Brexit, a reprimand to frontrunner Boris Johnson who said last week that Britain should leave with or without a deal by the end of October.

EU Tells Britain: There Will Be No Renegotiation of Brexit Deal

Mueller Says he Could Not Charge Trump Race to Succeed UK PM Theresa May as Congress Weighs Impeachment Centres on 'No Deal' Brexit Battle U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller said on Wednesday his probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election was never going to end with criminal charges against President Donald Trump but he did not clear him and indicated it was up to Congress to decide whether he should be impeached. In his first public comments since starting the investigation in May 2017, Mueller said Justice Department policy prevented him from bringing charges against a sitting

The prospect of a “no deal” Brexit has become the central battle of the race to succeed Prime Minister Theresa May. May said on May 24 she was quitting over her failure to deliver Brexit, potentially opening the way for a new leader who could seek a more divisive split with the European Union and lead to confrontation with the bloc or a possible parliamentary election. Setting out their pitch to the

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The European Union will not renegotiate the Brexit deal that Prime Minister Theresa May agreed, Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said on Tuesday, as concerns grew that a successor to May could trigger a confrontation with the bloc. Brexit is up in the air after May announced plans to step down, triggering a leadership contest in the ruling Conservative Party that could bring a new prime minister to power who wants a much more decisive break with the EU. Any successor to May will have to accept that the Brexit divorce deal she agreed will not be ratified by the current British parliament so they will have to find a solution to the Irish border issue that upset many lawmakers. Under laws now in effect, Britain will automatically leave the EU on Oct. 31 without an agreement unless parliament approves one first, the EU grants an extension, or the government revokes its decision to leave.

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The Conservative Party Leadership Battle Candidates are Vying to Show How Willing They are to Embrace No-Deal Brexit

by Yasmine El-Geressi Since Theresa May announced that she will stand down as prime minister on June 7, Conservative MPS have been throwing their hats into the ring to become the next party

leader. As many as 15 potential candidates are eyeing their chances in what is likely to be the most crowded Tory leadership battle in decades. After almost 3 years of Brexit chaos, deep divisions within the party and the nation over Britain’s withdrawal from the EU, both camps of the party’s

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war over the EU see this leadership election as an existential battle that has been underway on the sidelines for months.

Nominations will close the week beginning June 10th, followed by several rounds of voting among MPs. Under the party’s rules, Tory MPs - who currently number 313 - select two candidates to go through to a runoff in which around 120,000 Conservative party members who will vote on who they want to be leader. This process will last until the end of the month and the result of their vote will be announced before parliament rises for summer. To guarantee a place at the final ballot, candidates need at least 105 Conservative MPs behind them. The conventional wisdom is that a Brexiteer will win the contest as that would seem to reflect the preferences of the party members who are more Eurosceptic than the average conservative voter. But there are deep concerns among more centrist Conservatives that a Brexit pro-no deal hardliner is on the brink of becoming prime minister.

THE LEADING CONTENDERS

Conservative MP Boris Johnson leaves his London home on the day of the European Elections on May 2019 ,23 in London, United Kingdom. (Getty)

Boris Johnson - 18 MPs in support As one of the biggest names in British politics, former foreign secretary Boris Johnson is the man to beat. He was a figurehead of the campaign to leave the European Union (who famously wrote a secret op-ed column in support of remaining in the EU, just two days before he came out as a Brexiteer) and has one of the most outspoken critics of Theresa May’s Brexit plan, regularly undermining her efforts to sell her deal to Parliament. He resigned from his position as foreign secretary in May’s cabinet in 2018 in protest for her withdrawal strategy and has consistently pushed for a hard split from the EU. He rejected warnings about the impact of a no deal Brexit, insisting: «Whatever the doomsters may say ... there will be no shortage of Mars bars, we will still have potable drinking water in Britain. The planes will fly, the ferries will ply.»

Johnson first gained notoriety for his bombastic displays during his eight years as Mayor of London, a traditionally Labour city. But when he returned to parliament and during the EU referendum, he became a far more divisive figure. His 2 years as foreign secretary - memorable for his diplomatic gaffes - did his reputation no favours. Despite this, Johnson’s popularity is undimmed among the conservatives party members (in a recent YouGov poll, %39 of party members ranked him their first choice) who have the final vote on who becomes the party leader.

A Politico poll suggested “that of six leading Tory figures, all except Boris would lose the party votes compared with the 2017 election if they became leader”, says Politico’s Jack Blanchard. The poll shows that Johnson “is by far the bestplaced candidate to stem the tide of Tory voters planning to opt for Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party [last] week’s European elections”, Blanshard adds.

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Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party’s solid victory in the European Elections has lit a fire under the Conservative leadership race after they suffered one of the worst defeats in their history, leaving candidates vying to show how willing they are to leave the European Union without a deal.

However, Johnson has fewer fans in Parliament and so his main challenge will be to convince enough MPs to vote for him to get on to the ballot for party members. A “Stop Boris” movement has been underway among some centrist MPs, from members of the cabinet to backbenchers. The «One Nation Caucus» of moderate Tory MPs are trying to move the party towards the centre-ground and will «work to stop any leadership candidate who endorses a ‹Nigel Farage No-Deal Brexit,›» sources told the Mail newspaper.

Dominic Raab - 17 MPs in support Dominic Raab has long been seen as a contender to replace Theresa May by the Brexit-supporting wing of the Conservative party. The staunch Brexiteer, who few outside of Westminster had heard of before taking the role of Brexit secretary in the summer of 2018, has been calling to leave the EU long before the referendum. Raab resigned himself from the position four months into the job arguing that May’s deal did not amount to a proper departure from the EU. Now one of the Conservative’s loudest critics among Brexiteers, Raab has said that he would be prepared to leave the EU without a deal, saying the UK must “calmly demonstrate unflinching resolve to leave in October - at the latest.” He has also blasted those who want a second referendum.

He said: «If there›s an attempt to reverse the referendum, stop Brexit altogether I think that would cut across not only the democratic mandate, the biggest in history we had.”

Michael Gove - 17 MPs in support Environment secretary Michael Gove is an experienced minister having previously served as justice secretary and education secretary, and is often seen as a “safe pair of hands.”

Since betraying Boris Johnson in the previous leadership contest by withdrawing his support on the morning Johson was due to declare and throwing his hat in the ring instead, Gove has been working on resuscitating trust among his colleagues.

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Before the 2016 referendum, he campaigned for Britain’s exit, and he largely backed the Prime Minister’s strategy during her time in office. He was vocal of his support for May and urged others within his party to support her deal in several iterations. He has said that he would run as a “unity candidate”, suggesting he would push first and foremost for a deal.

Jeremy Hunt - 10 MPs in support Jeremy Hunt was the longest-serving Health Secretary in British history before replacing Boris Johnson as Foreign Secretary in July 2018. He left the Department of Health after securing a 20£bn funding increase for the NHS, but angered junior doctors after changing their contracts so they wouldn›t receive extra pay for the many shifts they work, making him unpopular with many who work in or reply on the state-run, financially stretched NHS. Like Theresa May, Hunt voted to remain in the EU in the 2016 referendum but now says he backs Brexit and has urged the Conservative membership to set aside their differences over Brexit and unite against a common foe - the EU. He has warned that his party will be committing «political suicide» if it tries to push through a no-deal Brexit as it would result in a general election, which could see Labour take power.

Sajid Javid - 7 MPs in support Home Secretary Sajid Javid became the first person to hold the position from an ethnic minority when he was appointed in April 2018. The son of a Pakistani bus driver from Rochdale, he was a managing director at Deutsche Bank before becoming an MP in 2010. He has served in a number of cabinet roles and scores consistently well in polls of party members. Javid has been positioning himself for a potential leadership role since early this year, making waves when he revoked the citizenship of “ISIS bride” Shamima Begum.

He backed remain in the referendum but like May and Hunt, he has since positioned himself as a firm leaver.

Andrea Leadsom - 2 MPs in support A prominent Brexiteer, the former Commons leader

A “Stop Boris” movement has been underway among some centrist MPs, from members of the cabinet to backbenchers.

decisively quit the cabinet as May tried to win last gasp support for her withdrawal bill saying she no longer believed the government’s approach would deliver Brexit. She was the last candidate standing against Theresa May in the 2016 leadership bid but was forced to the race after widely criticised comments about rival Theresa May. She has said that she is prepared to leave the EU without a deal. She said: “In order to succeed in a negotiation you have to be prepared to leave without a deal, but I have a three-point plan for Brexit”.

LEADERSHIP CONTENDERS CLASH OVER NO-DEAL Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party’s solid victory in the European Elections has lit a fire under the Conservative leadership race after they suffered one of the worst defeats in their history, leaving candidates vying to show how willing they are to leave the European Union without a deal. Voters sent a clear message to the Conservatives, who won just %9.1 of the vote, coming in at fifth place behind the Green Party. Boris Johnson’s chances and those of other hard-line Brexiters are likely to be boosted by the fact a Brexit deal remains unresolved, allowing them to resurrect arguments for a renegotiation and, if that cannot be achieved, a so-called “managed no-deal”, which is overwhelmingly backed by Tory members who will select the new leader. According to a poll

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A combination of picture created in London on May ,24 2019 shows recent pictures of the six main contenders to replace Britain›s Prime Minister Theresa May when she resigns on June 7: (L-R) Britain›s Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Secretary Michael Gove; former Brexit secretary Dominic Raab; Britain›s Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt; Britain›s Home Secretary Sajid Javid; former leader of the House of Commons Angela Leadsom; and former foreign secretary Boris Johnson all pictured leaving 10 Downing Street, central London. (Getty)

by YouGov, two-thirds of the 120,000 Conservative party members want a no-deal Brexit.

But the Conservative leader contenders are clashing over support for no-deal Brexit. The first shots fired in the Tory contest was the launch of the counter-initiative “Stop Boris’ campaign which was founded by Work & Pensions secretary Amber Rudd and former education secretary Nicky Morgan.

The -60member group is being interpreted as a warning to Boris and other leadership front runners who have said they would back a no-deal Brexit. Sir Nicholas Soames, who is part of the group, told Sky News: «I don›t think we will want to vote for anyone who is going to propagate a no-deal situation.”

In a sign of growing animosity in the leadership race, Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt, International Development Secretary Rory Stewart and Justice Secretary David Gauke have torn into the hardline approach being pursued by Boris Johnson, Dominic Raab, Andrea Leadsom and Esther McVey for the UK to leave on October 31, with or without a deal.

Stewart echoed the views of many moderate Tory MPs when he said he would find it «very difficult» to stay in the Conservative party if its new leader endorsed leaving the EU without a deal, and said implementing such an outcome could ultimately lead to a Labour government.

Hunt has stressed that pursuing no deal risks triggering a general election because it would be torpedoed in Parliament

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According to poll by YouGov, twothirds of the 120,000 Conservative party members want a no-deal Brexit. and that the resulting verdict from voters would be “absolutely catastrophic” for the Tories. He branded a policy of seeking crash out of the European Union without a deal as “political suicide” and called for a “statesmanlike and robust” approach to trying to renegotiate the withdrawal agreement, even though Brussels has repeatedly ruled this out.

A majority of members of Parliament are against no-deal (the split was 160 MPs vs 400 in a vote on March 27) but there’s not a clear mechanism for them to prevent it happening, according to the Institute for Government. The new leader could ignore MPs and press ahead with no deal as the legal default position but some MPs are threatening to vote against the Government in a confidence motion if the Prime Minister spearheads a no-deal Brexit and Parliament is sidelined to avoid leaving the EU without an agreement. Chancellor Philip Hammond announced his plans to join the revolt saying that any new leader who tries to implement a no deal Brexit would face the prospect of having to “leave office.”

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What Theresa May’s Resignation Means for British Domestic Politics

Why the Crisis Won’t End After the Tory Leadership Competition 14

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By: Ali El Shamy On May 2019 ,24, British Prime Minister Theresa May finally announced her intention to resign from her post on June 7, paving the way for a Conservative leadership contest which will produce a new Prime Minister. While the Tory leadership battle will be straightforward, the same cannot be said for the state of domestic politics after the fact. Moreover, the recent European parliamentary election has been a huge blow for the country’s two mainstream parties, with Labor coming in third and the ruling Conservative coming in fifth. All these circumstances don’t spell good news for the Tories since other parties, namely Labor, are eager to take advantage of their weakness and gain power for themselves.

THE TORIES AND MAY IN DISARRAY

British Prime Minister Theresa May (L) and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker (R) attend a special European Union (EU) summit in Brussels, Belgium on May 2019 ,28. (Getty)

Theresa May’s premiership has been disastrous in many ways. Despite presenting herself as a no-nonsense politician who would deliver what the British electorate asked for back in 2016, she ended up negotiating a deal that delayed many elements of a proper divorce from Europe and what’s worse she negotiated a deal that did not properly address important issues like the Irish backstop. Throughout her premiership, she claimed that a no deal was better than a bad deal, but she still pushed for her unpopular deal, a move that ultimately led to her demise.

Despite the fact that the leadership competition will kick off in June, a new Prime Minister is expected to be elected by mid-July. This will leave the country’s new leader with just over three months to negotiate a new deal with the European Union, a task that took May three years. A significant portion of Conservative members is comprised of Brexit supporters, as such a pro-Brexit Tory, particularly Boris Johnson, will likely end up as one of the final two premiership candidates. If Johnson does end up becoming Prime Minister, then predicting the direction he will opt for the country is difficult since he has proven to be quite unpredictable in the past. If he is indeed the staunch Brexiter he claims to be, then he might choose to pull the country out of the EU without a deal. While that would be a risky action to take, it would please

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The UK’s new leader will have just over three months to negotiate a new deal with the European Union, a task that took May three years.

Brexiter Tory supporters who simply want the government to get on with the process without any bureaucratic delays. Such a move would also be a thorn to smaller pro-Brexit parties that have arisen in recent years.

CORBYN’S WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY The Labor party has also not handled the Brexit situation well, as its unclear stance on Brexit has caused it to lose public support from both remainers and leavers. Moreover, its failure to oppose the ruling party by advocating for a second referendum has alienated its young proEU voter base. Remainer frustration with Labor was translated into vote loses in the European election as the Liberal Democrats arose as the primary pro-remain party, coming in second after the Brexit Party. In spite of this, the current weakness of the Tory party might present Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn the window of opportunity to call for a snap election, increasing his chances of becoming Prime Minister.

However, the shadows of the 2017 snap election still loom over parliament, as May sought to solidify her strength in parliament only to force her into forming a coalition with the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). Current circumstances do not make calls for an election ideal, since both parties seem unlikely to gain a majority in parliament, as such, the party with more seats will have to form a coalition with smaller parties.

Recent coalitions in the British parliament have proven to be unfavorable for such smaller parties, as the Lib-Dems only recently recovered from their coalition with David Cameron and the DUP has been increasingly frustrated with the Conservative’s inaction over the Irish backstop.

So it would suffice to say, that smaller parties

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will probably not be eager to join forces with the two mainstream parties this time around. If Corbyn makes a dramatic turnaround and starts to openly support a second referendum, then the Liberal Democrats might be more encouraged to join Labor. However, Corbyn, like Boris Johnson, is now seen as an opportunist who is desperate to become Prime Minister and as a result, any sudden political U-turns on Brexit will be seen as insincere.

IMPACT OF SMALLER PARTIES IN THE NEXT GENERAL ELECTION Shortly after winning a seat for the South East England constituency in the European Parliament, Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage gave a stark warning to the country’s political establishment: “If we don’t leave (the EU) on October 31, then the scores we have seen for the Brexit Party today will be repeated in a general election and we are getting ready for it.”

The Brexit Party and the Liberal-Democrats’ big gains in the last EU parliamentary elections have left many to ponder whether or not these smaller parties with clearer messages can repeat their success if a general election arises. History has shown that such a scenario is unlikely, during the 2014 European parliamentary elections UKIP won the most seats in the UK gaining 24 out of a possible 73; however, during the following year’s general election they only managed to win one seat in the British parliament. While speaking to the Independent,

Conservative incompetence and division over the past three years may have paved the way for an eventual Corbyn government.

Andrew Russel, a politics professor from the University of Liverpool, argued that the Brexit Party lack the grassroots organization to do well in an upcoming general election, furthermore, he said that the way the European elections are structured actually helps these smaller parties perform better than in domestic elections. As such, the Liberal-Democrats, a party with a long history and grassroots, might actually have a big impact on any upcoming general election. The fact that, until 2015, the Lib-Dems were the third biggest party in the country also helps its chances. Additionally, the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) will likely gain more seats in parliament, as the political divide between England and Scotland has been widening ever since the 2016 referendum.

Despite Labor’s shortcomings, the Electoral Calculus currently predicts that if a general election were to occur then Labor would gain the most seats but it would still be short of a majority. The founder of the Electoral Calculus,

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A Labour activist takes a selfie with Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn as he canvasses in Lambeth ahead of the forthcoming European Elections on May 2019 ,21 in London, England. (Getty)

renegotiation, while Xavier Bettel, the Prime Minister of Luxemburg was much more assertive as he said: “We had the negotiation, we finished a negotiation and it is not because a head of government is going to change that we restart negotiations…”

It is evident that any new leader who takes over the UK government will have a tall mountain to climb, especially if he or she seeks a new deal with a headstrong EU. Moreover, with the deadline looming closer it is unlikely that a new head of government would have enough time to get a substantive deal from the EU. In an ironic twist, a new Prime Minister might find him or herself forced to push for May’s deal, lest risking the country getting pushed out of the EU without a deal.

Martin Baxter, also spoke with Channel 4, stating that Corbyn would almost certainly become the next Prime Minister, ruling either as head of a minority government or a coalition government. If Labor does win an election, then it would probably not choose to rule as a minority government since that would make it difficult to pass legislation. Consequently, Labor would need a coalition partner and the most likely candidate is, of course, the Liberal Democrats. Whether or not the Lib-Dems choose to team up with Labor is up to debate, but the bottom line is that the Conservative incompetence and division over the past three years may have paved the way for an eventual Corbyn government.

WHAT THE EU THINKS The UK took part in the May 28 EU Summit in which EU leaders delivered one clear message: the Brexit deal will not be renegotiated. The President of the European Commision, JeanClaude Juncker, stated that there will be no

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Boris Johnson arrives at the home of his girlfriend Carrie Symonds on May ,27 2019 in London, England. (Getty)

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Tension in the Gulf Appears to Peak, with Slight Indications of a Thaw While War of Words Continues Between Washington and Tehran, US Officials Say Iran Threat Has Receded 18

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by Joseph Braude The latest escalation in tensions between Iran and Washington is not yet over, but appears to be approaching its denouement.

While Iranian and American officials continue to trade stifflyworded warnings, American officials says that the Iranian threat to U.S. troops has receded, while President Trump has denied any intention of seeking regime change in Tehran.

WHITE HOUSE APPROVES ADDITIONAL DETERRENT MEASURES On May 24, President Trump announced that the U.S. would be dispatching an additional 1,500 troops to the Middle East to bolster U.S. Central Command defenses. The New York Times reported that U.S. military commanders, supported by more hawkish members of the administration, had been considering deploying larger numbers of troops, but had been overruled.

Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan called the 1,500 figure “a prudent response to credible threats from Iran.”

On the same day, President Trump declared a state of emergency, enabling himself to circumvent Congress and unilaterally approve 22 pending transfers of munitions, aircraft parts, and other supplies to three Arab countries: Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Jordan. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement that the measure was intended to «to deter Iranian aggression and build partner self-defense capacity … These sales will support our allies, enhance Middle East stability, and help these nations to deter and defend themselves from [Iran].»

This handout picture released by the US navy shows an F/A18-E Super Hornet landing on the flight deck of the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln in the Gulf.

(Getty)

Iranian officials were quick to respond to these measures, with General Morteza Qorbani, an adviser to Iran’s military command, threatening, “If [the Americans] commit the slightest stupidity, we will send these ships to the bottom of the sea along with their crew and planes using two missiles or two new secret weapons.”

Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, for his part, issued more tempered criticism: “Increased U.S. presence in our region is extremely dangerous and it threatens international peace and security, and this should be addressed.”

AMERICAN OFFICIALS SAY IRANIAN THREAT RECEDED, DENY “REGIME CHANGE” MOTIVATIONS Despite the additional measures aimed at containing Iranian influence, U.S. officials have also been hinting that the Iranian threat to US forces — the catalyst for the latest bout of tension between the two nations — had receded. According to Secretary Shanahan, the deployments of additional American forces to the region had a marked deterrent effect. “We’ve put on hold the potential for attacks on Americans,” Shanahan told reporters before briefing Congress on the situation in the Persian Gulf.

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Despite the additional measures aimed at containing Iranian influence, U.S. officials have also been hinting that the Iranian threat to US forces - the catalyst for the latest bout of tension between the two nations - had receded.

“That doesn’t mean that the threats that we’ve previously identified have gone away,” he added. “Our prudent response, I think, has given the Iranians time to recalculate. I think our response was a measure of our will and our resolve that we will protect our people and our interests in the region.”

On Monday, President Trump himself weighed in. He disclaimed any intention of regime change, and suggested the potential for a future US-Iranian agreement. At a joint press conference in Tokyo with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Trump said, “We’re not looking for regime change. I just want to make that clear. We’re looking for no nuclear weapons… and I think we’ll make a deal. I think Iran — again, I think Iran has tremendous economic potential. And I look forward to letting them get back to the stage where they can show that.»

BOTH SIDES CLAIM VICTORY Iranian officials began signaling this week that, in their understanding, the peak of the crisis is behind them. In a recent interview, the head of Iran’s parliamentary security and foreign affairs commission played down the prospect of armed conflict.

“We don’t see [these developments] as a sign war is coming,” conservative lawmaker Heshmatollah Falahatpisheh said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. These moves “are not real” but “propaganda.”

White House supporters are meanwhile interpreting the easing of tensions as a vindication of the administration’s policy.

According to the Wall Street Journal editorial page, “the real story behind the current Mideast tension is that Iran is acting out because Mr. Trump’s policy of applying maximum pressure is working. The U.S. recently designated the IRGC as a terrorist group, which will hurt its many business interests. Washington also has closed loopholes on the sale of Iranian oil and announced new restrictions on Iran’s metals exports. All of this has Tehran lashing out with anger and threats.”

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Iran’s Possible Covert Tactics How the Regime Might Resort to Proxies to Attack US Regional Interests

by Dennis Ross *

Historical record shows that the Iranians have been willing to talk to the US when they were under pressure or were fearful.

Tensions are rising in the Middle East generally and especially in the Gulf. The Trump Administration decision to end the waivers for eight countries permitted to buy Iranian oil is, not surprisingly, having a dramatic effect on the Iranian economy. With Iranian exports of oil expected to drop to 500,000 barrels a day, the government will be losing a significant source of its revenue and the Iranian economy is now in free fall. Given how much pressure the Administration is now putting on the Islamic Republic, the Iranians were bound to react and attempt to show that it was not only the Americans who could impose costs: they, too, could impose a price on America and its interests and friends in the region.

Of course the modus operandi of the Iranians is to use proxies and conduct deniable attacks—not to provoke directly.

They have always understood that directly attacking the United States could unleash a powerful military response. So instead they focus on indirection, developing plans and options to carryout sabotage and proxy operations against US forces, interests and friends.

In the aftermath of the Trump decision to end the waivers, such planning clearly began—and American intelligence picked it up. The Administration’s decision to publicize the intelligence and to move a carrier strike group to the region was shaped by the belief that

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if they exposed what the Iranians were planning, it would put the Iranians on notice that we knew what they were doing and that would enhance deterrence of them. National Security Advisor John Bolton’s declaration that Iran would face “unrelenting force” if it acted against our forces, our interests and our regional allies was clearly made with this in mind.

But by seeking to cover so many threats, Bolton left the Iranians plenty of room both to test the limits of what the US would do while also exposing what threats to our friends and our interests we would not be responding to. We clearly do not want oil terminals, tankers and infrastructure attacked in the region, and yet that is precisely what happened with no US response after the Bolton assertion. Note, for example, that the day after the Bolton declaration, there was an explosion in the Saudi port of Yanbu of a petroleum shipping terminal. Two days later, four oil tankers—two Saudi, one Emirate and one Norwegian--were sabotaged with explosives blowing holes in their hulls. And, after another two days, Houthi drones bombed two Saudi pumping stations.

Yes, Shia militias signaled what they could do to American personnel and forces in Iraq by firing a missile roughly 300 meters from the US embassy in the “Green Zone” in Baghdad. But this was designed to be a reminder; the attacks on

the tankers and related oil targets were different.

They were designed to drive the price of oil and insurance up—not only with an eye toward intimidation of its neighbors but also perhaps hoping to affect Trump’s calculus. (After all, when he granted the oil waivers last November, he explained them in terms of keeping the oil price low.)

Moreover, as the rhetoric escalated and fears of miscalculation were being opening discussed in Western capitals, President Trump was quick to say he did not want a war with Iran. The Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, seemed to echo that sentiment when he rather uncharacteristically also said that “neither we nor they want a war…” But tensions have not subsided, because the Iranians seem to believe that as long as they or their proxies can carry out deniable attacks, the US and others won’t respond.

The fact that there is no direct communication between the two also increases the potential for missed signals and misunderstanding. So what might be done? President Trump says if the Iranians call, he will talk and the two “can do a deal.” Ali Khamenei may have said neither side wants a war but speaking to the Americans now would look like a surrender and he is not going to do it. Indeed, at the same time he was saying in televised remarks that neither side wanted a war, he was also describing talking with the Americans was like “poison.”

Still, the historical record shows that the Iranians have been willing to talk to the US when they were under pressure or were fearful. No doubt, Khamenei prefers to try to outlast Trump and then come to his successor (and the Europeans) and say “you owe us.” But the decline of the Iranian economy may increase the Iranian need to find a way to reduce the external pressure being applied by the US. And, that might yet produce a negotiation; true, it will probably be indirect given the Iranian desire to avoid looking like they caved to American pressure, but even an indirect negotiation probably through the Russians could produce an agreement with the Trump Administration.

Knowing the Iranians, they will want to increase their leverage prior to any such talks— and that may come not only from ongoing acts

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President Trump was quick to say he did not want a war with Iran. The Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, seemed to echo that sentiment when he rather uncharacteristically also said that “neither we nor they want a war…” of sabotage on others’ oil infrastructure—but also by breaching the limits of the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal. This would pressure on Trump as well as the Europeans. The Iranians understand the Europeans badly want them to stay in the JCPOA and that is at least one reason why Hassan Rouhani, the Iranian president, is playing on European fears, giving them until July 7th to show they will produce economic benefits to Iran to circumvent the American-led sanctions or Iran may no longer respect the nuclear deal. Can European fears build pressure on the Trump Administration?

Unlikely, but Trump already is saying he is ready to talk and his interest in talking is likely to go up if the Iranians start producing enriched uranium either at higher levels of enrichment or simply by accumulating more than the 300 kilograms they are permitted under the terms of the JCPOA. Now is a good time for the Administration and its Gulf Allies to talk about their respective policies toward Iran now. The Gulf states might ask the president and his senior aides, what are they striving to achieve? What are the prospects of escalation? What is the US prepared to do to support its allies in practical terms as they face sabotage or proxy attacks? What should the US that our partners are prepared to do? If the Iranians actually took the president up on his offer to talk and his willingness to do a deal, what might that look like?

This is a time of uncertainty, and it is precisely for these times that allies should talk and make sure they are either on the same page or at least know the areas of convergence and divergence.

At least between the US and its partners in the region, this is not a time for surprises.

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Oman’s Role in Mediating Middle Eastern Conflicts The Omani Foreign Minister Discusses his Country’s Approach to the Region’s Increasing Tensions By: Mustafa El Dessouki On May 2019 ,22, the United Kingdom and the Sultanate of Oman signed a Comprehensive Agreement which aims to improve the bilateral relations between the two states as well as develop their political, economic, scientific, and cultural ties. The Omani Minister for Foreign Affairs, His Excellency Yousef bin Alawi; and the Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom, Jeremy Hunt, signed the agreement in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London. During the signing ceremony, Hunt noted that Oman is a key regional ally, as it is playing a role in establishing peace in Yemen and preventing Iran from gaining a nuclear arsenal.

The signing came two months after both states signed the Joint Declaration on Enduring Friendship in Muscat.

Yousef bin Alawi, who has been serving as Oman's foreign affairs minister since 1997, spoke to Majalla about some of the region’s most important issues, including peace talks between the Palestinians and the Israelis and Muscat’s own role in pushing for peace in the region. The minister also spoke of Oman’s stance on

It is now clear to the Arab world that the preservation of Israel’s existence is necessary for the stability of the region.

the rising tensions between the US and Iran as he called on the international community to collectively find a peaceful solution to the crisis, one that prevents military conflict in the Gulf.

Q: The Sultanate of Oman and United Kingdom have a deep relationship that has lasted centuries. What new aspects of the Omani-British relationship does the “Comprehensive Agreement” address?

A: Our relationship with the UK is entrenched in history, and the agreement officially codifies the well-established friendship between Muscat and London. The agreement also seeks to develop the ties that bind us. As such, the agreement aims to support economic growth and increased investment by developing a strong and mutually beneficial partnership. The partnership we are reaching for is one that allows for a strong, open, and competitive economic environment between both states. The agreement covers many fields — be they political, economic, scientific, cultural, or technological — as it aims to launch a new phase of bilateral relations as continuing our already established friendship.

Q: During your talks with Jeremy Hunt, did you discuss regional issues such as the state of peace efforts between the Palestinians and Israelis and the U.S.’s anticipated announcement of a new peace plan? Did the rising tensions between Washington and Tehran come up during the talks? What about the war in Yemen?

A: We have indeed discussed all these issues; we have also talked about the importance of promoting peace and security at both the

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Yousef bin Alawi

regional and global levels. We spoke of the challenges the region is facing, such as the current U.S.-Iran tensions in the Gulf, the Palestinian issue, and other conflicts in the region. The Sultanate of Oman believes that the UK is still a global power, and that despite the unprecedented internal challenges it is facing, it will remain a global power. Britain’s power will endure not because it’s a permanent member of the UN Security Council, but because it’s still a big player in global conflict resolution.

The UK has long been our partner in resolving conflicts in the Middle East, and I believe that this relationship helps both sides find solutions to all the underlying issues in the Gulf and the region as a whole.

Q: Last October, the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, visited Muscat and met with Sultan Qaboos bin Said al Said. Has this visit produced any new developments regarding the quest for a peace deal, and has it expanded Omani-Israeli relations?

A: We have normalized relations with Israel in this interconnected world, and Netanyahu is not the first Israeli Prime Minister to visit Oman, as Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, and other Israeli officials have visited us during times of increased tensions in the region.

The visit came after the Prime Minister made an official request, which we agreed to, and after President Mahmoud Abbas’s official visit to Oman. We listened to the Prime Minister’s views and we told him our own views, which emphasize the

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The Sultanate of Oman has not seen the plan, but the Palestinians cannot miss their opportunity to establish a state for themselves.

Palestinians’ right to an internationally recognized independent state, as this will serve as the core to any peace deal. This will not be easy, but Israel and Palestine lie within the same geographical location, and consequently, both sides can establish a mutually beneficial partnership that works for each of them. Israel is currently a developed state, but it is occupying Palestinian lands in the West Bank and the Gaza strip….in time both sides will have to cooperate and establish relations. Despite their economic, technological and scientific prowess, Israelis don’t feel safe or secure in the region and they cannot move forward as a nation without such a sense of security. The Palestinians have the power to provide this security for themselves and the Israelis, but no side has made that critical first step in establishing good political relations. These last 40 years of Israel's occupation of the Gaza Strip and West Bank have taught Israelis that Palestinians are determined to gain their right to a state, while Palestinians have learned what it is that the Israelis seek. As a result, both sides are

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clear on each of their demands. All that’s needed now is political reconciliation.

Q: Three weeks ago, Majalla published an interview with Jason Greenblatt, an Assistant to President Donald J. Trump and the White House’s Special Representative for International Negotiations. He, together with Jared Kushner, has prepared the Trump Administration’s proposed Middle East Peace Plan.

During the interview, Greenblatt called on the Palestinians not to reject the plan before all its details are revealed, and said that the Palestinian Authority will be judged harshly for passing up prosperity and peace. What’s your opinion on this statement?

A: We need to take into consideration that there will be a heated debate on the U.S.’s proposed peace plan. The Sultanate of Oman has not seen the plan, but the Palestinians cannot miss their opportunity to establish a state for themselves. We cannot accept the prospect of Israel having its own state, while Palestinians are sleeping in tents. We have told the U.S. this and have emphasized the need to help Palestinians in the occupied lands and in the diaspora. Israel needs to be a friendly state towards the Palestinians and it needs to be a partner rather than an occupying force. If the U.S.’s proposed plan doesn’t have these terms, then it will be a deficient one.

Q: If the U.S.’s plan works, will you call on the states within the region to stop boycotting Israel and to establish full, normal relations between the Arab states and Israel?

A: Arabs are split over the prospect of peace with Israel, but if the Palestinians agree to the plan and they get their own state, then everything else can be settled. The ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict has caused generations of Arabs to harbor negative feelings toward Israel, and such feelings will not go away overnight. It should also be noted that most major events that have taken place in the region over recent years have been due to the Palestinian issue. The conflict in Afghanistan was because of Palestine and the Iranian Revolution was because of Palestine, more recently terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda and IS have used the Palestinian issue as a rallying call. For years the West, Russia, China, Japan, and various African states have given us

The Palestinians’ right to an internationally recognized independent state will serve as the core to any peace deal.

promises to help us resolve the issue, but they have yet to provide any concrete solutions. It is now clear to the Arab world that the preservation of Israel’s existence is necessary for the stability of the region, provided, of course, that a state for the Palestinians is established.

People need to let go of the past and think of how economic development can reap shared benefits, peace and reconciliation between the Palestinians and Israelis. Just think what could happen if both sides share Jerusalem as a touristic city which receives millions of Jewish, Christian and Muslim visitors per year. The city would gain substantial investment for shopping centers, hospitals and hotels. Both sides would earn billions from this holy city teeming with sacred treasures. If civilians receive accommodation, a state, and other such benefits, then they will forget all the other problems.

Q: Do you believe, however, that Hamas would ever accept such a civil approach toward resolving the conflict?

A: Hamas would accept the situation if an internationally recognized Palestinian state is established, I don’t believe Hamas is a “fan” of this continued fighting. Nevertheless, Palestinians from all sides will not accept anything less than their own state.

Q: Do you think media outlets, educational curricula, and religious discourse have played a role in planting seeds of intolerance among the peoples of the region, particularly between Israelis and Arabs? And has the Sultanate of Oman started to reform these three elements?

A: All three elements have played a role in increasing intolerance, and reforming these institutions will take a long time. It is necessary that we defeat such discourses before introducing new ones. Unfortunately, desensitizing those who were born and raised on such doctrine will not happen in a short period of time. Rather, changing people’s thinking will need

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Israel and Palestine lie on the same geographical location; consequently, both sides can establish a mutually beneficial partnership that works for both of them A: Oman will likely participate in the workshop, but it should be noted that such conventions are a traditional American way of garnering support for deals and Arabs aren’t accustomed to such methods of deal-making.

to happen over multiple stages. The extremist doctrine will not end overnight, but it is necessary to resist it by building on moderate religious teachings. Oman does not have a problem of religious fanaticism, as our nation has always had a reputation for moderation and tolerance. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the broader region, as many states are currently struggling against intolerance and fundamentalism. This fight will be a long one and may take up to 20 years, but we must not let Palestine fall victim to religious and Islamic conflicts in coming years.

Yousef bin Alawi

Q: Bahrain is set to host the “Peace to Prosperity” workshop on June 25; will Oman take part in the workshop?

Q: On your way to London, you stopped by Tehran to meet with the Iranian Foreign Minister, Javad Zarif. During your visit, did you get the sense that Iran is willing to start negotiating with the U.S., and would Oman be an intermediary between both sides?

A: I attentively listened to what the Iranians had to say on the increasing tensions between them and the U.S. They do not wish to go to war, and I think both sides know the implications such a conflict would have on global security. Moreover, Oman is doing all it can to prevent the risks of such a devastating war. The crisis is near a breaking point and it is necessary that a coordinated international effort do all it can to prevent both parties from entering into conflict. Oman cannot mediate between between both states alone, and the international community must do all it can to stop a war from breaking out in the Gulf. Once the tensions simmer, we can restart negotiating the disputes that started the conflict in the first place.

Q: What’s your opinion on the situation in Yemen and Iran’s support for the Houthi rebels, who are posing a threat to Gulf security, particularly the security of Saudi Arabia and the UAE? A: First, I ask both sides to accommodate Martin Griffiths, the UN’s Special Envoy for Yemen, and work closely with him in order to find a solution as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, the Houthis have adopted Shiite revolutionary discourse, something they have never done in the past, and this ideology is part of the reason for the prolonged conflict. The conflict has lasted too long and all sides need to show willingness for reconciliation.

Q: Finally, FIFA has offered Oman the opportunity to co-host the 2022 World Cup, will you accept it?

A: FIFA has asked us to co-host the next World Cup with Qatar because it planned to expand the number of finalists from 32 teams to 48. I told them that Oman wasn’t initially part of the hosting plans and we do not have any intentions to co-host the World Cup now, as such, we declined the offer while giving FIFA other suggestions to better accommodate more teams.

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This Is Not a Great-Power Competition Why the Term Doesn’t Capture Today’s Reality

By Michael J. Mazarr* A new era of great-power competition is upon us. That, at least, is the emerging conventional wisdom among foreign policy analysts in Washington. Both the 2017 National Security Strategy (NSS) and the 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS) signaled a shift in thinking: the unclassified summary of the latter declared that “inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S. national security,” and many have turned to the classic concept of great-power rivals to describe the new reality. “After being dismissed as a phenomenon of an earlier century,” the NSS concluded, “great power competition returned.” Former U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis used the term in a speech outlining the NDS. Outside government, references to great-power competition have proliferated over the last several months, the term having become a sort of shorthand for the situation the United States now faces. But does the phrase really capture today’s reality?

Great-power competition describes a specific pattern of relations between states—the sort practiced by the great empires and nation-states from the seventeenth through the early twentieth centuries. China’s rise as an economic and political power and Russia’s increasing assertiveness

on the world stage have understandably fuelled analogies to that time. But the emerging era does not match the patterns of the past. Treating it as though it does risks misunderstanding both the character of today’s threats and the source of the United States’ competitive advantages.

A CLASSIC PATTERN Great-power competition reflected a reality that many see as perennial in world politics: the leading powers of any era tend to view one another in suspicious, hostile, and sometimes apocalyptic terms and to compete bitterly for power, influence, and status. The typical version of the concept describes several specific ways in which collections of great powers interact.

For one, great-power competitions create a churning, multipolar structure of world politics in which major powers face a powerful set of potential enemies and constantly shuffle their allegiances. The classic case is Europe in several distinct periods from the seventeenth century to the early twentieth: France, Great Britain, the Habsburg and Austro-Hungarian empires, Prussia (later Germany), Spain, Russia, and others worried about, armed against, and aligned with and against one another in a tumbling geopolitical contest.

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U.S. President Donald Trump and China's President Xi Jinping meet business leaders at the Great Hall of the People on November ,9 2017 in Beijing, China.

(Getty)

During periods of great-power competition, states occasionally settle into temporary agreements on norms to regulate their conduct—as in the heyday of the nineteenthcentury Vienna System—but for the most part, ordering mechanisms remain weak. Players seek power, influence, wealth, and status unencumbered by shared international institutions, norms, or rules. The kaleidoscopic rivalries of great-power competition thus fuel the intense uncertainty in world politics that is a recurring pattern in those eras.

In classic great-power competition, rivalries typically manifest themselves in military forms of competition and conflict. Economic, social, and cultural tensions have shaped these contests as well, but traditional greatpower clashes were defined by the prospect of largescale warfare. Great powers from Napoleon’s France to Bismarck’s Prussia to Wilhelmine Germany to the revisionists of the 1930s threatened one another with invasion and war. Military strength was the ultimate arbiter of such contests.

Each of these three elements—a multipolar system, a general disregard for rule-based constraints on behavior, and dominantly political-military forms of rivalry—is present during periods of great-power competition. Yet none of them accurately describes world politics today.

The NSS and NDS are right to point out the growing competition between the United States and China and, in

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The current structure of the international system is not fundamentally multipolar. It does show growing signs of multipolarity, in the reduced degrees of U.S. predominance and as several regional powers have become more assertive. less comprehensive terms, between the United States and Russia. But these rivalries (and other relationships between major powers today) are unfolding in ways, and within a larger international context, that bear little resemblance to great-power competitions of the past.

THE EMERGING ERA The current structure of the international system is not fundamentally multipolar. It does show growing signs of multipolarity, in the reduced degrees of U.S. predominance and as several regional powers have become more assertive. Yet it also retains many elements of the post–

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Cold War period of unipolarity. Washington remains the predominant power for many reasons: its overall military superiority, its leading role in so many international organizations, its formidable set of treaty allies, and its ownership of the world’s dominant reserve currency are chief among them. At the same time, the emerging system has important elements of bipolarity: the United States and China are clearly first among equals, and their rivalry is likely to play a disproportionate role in shaping the course of world politics. Today’s world thus reflects a complex mixture of unipolar, bipolar, and multipolar elements that does not match the classic vision of a colliding set of roughly equivalent great powers.

Moreover, when states compete today, they do so mediated by institutions, rules, and norms that differ starkly from the conditions during most periods of true great-power competition. Most major powers today are firmly established industrial democracies that want stability and prosperity and harbor no meaningful territorial ambitions. A dense network of organizations, treaties, informal processes, and many other constraints regulates their relations. The postwar order, although imperfect, has produced the most highly institutionalized and normbound international system in history. Critically, this order is not imposed on an unruly set of troublemakers—it reflects deeply embedded economic preferences for peace, stability, and prosperity.

The resulting relations between most leading powers look very little like the typical pattern during classical eras of great-power competition. Japan, for example, does not fear

Russia and China, for example, pose very different challenges for Washington. Both seek regime security and recognition as equal powers, but Russia aims to disrupt the current U.S.-led order whereas China seeks to supplant the United States’ role at the hub of world politics.

India. (Indeed, they are collaborating to balance Chinese power.) The European Union does not fear Brazil, which does not fear Mexico. Many of the world’s most powerful states belong in military alliances and political unions with one another; even those that do not are collaborating extensively in areas such as trade, information security, climate, and global development. The security problems of the emerging era come not from a set of mutually suspicious great powers but from a handful of partly revisionist states, led by Russia and China, unsatisfied with their status in the international system.

The way those states express that dissatisfaction, moreover, differs significantly from the classic predominance of political-military forms of great-power competition.

Because of the nuclear revolution, victorious wars of conquest are simply not a realistic option. No modern Russian Napoleon could imagine seizing the whole of Europe, because to do so would be to court nuclear annihilation. Beyond the effect of nuclear weapons, several factors—including the role of democracy, prosperity, and economic interdependence—have ushered in an age when

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Russian military police officers stand in formation during a Victory Day Parade in the city of Grozny, Chechen Republic, Russia, marking the 74th anniversary of Soviet victory in the 1945-1941 Great Patriotic War. (Getty)

homelands—Germany’s fleet threatening the United Kingdom’s survival before World War I, Napoleonic France invading its neighbors, and the like. Whatever China’s objectives are today, they will not be served by a direct attack on other great powers.

THE WRONG FRAME To see the state of international relations today as a new great-power competition is not only inaccurate but dangerous. Viewing competitors as mirror images of one another—as standard-issue great powers, motivated in similar ways and subject to the same kinds of influence— prevents U.S. policymakers from making crucial distinctions. Russia and China, for example, pose very different challenges for Washington. Both seek regime security and recognition as equal powers, but Russia aims to disrupt the current U.S.-led order whereas China seeks to supplant the United States’ role at the hub of world politics.

Conceiving of the emerging era as a classic great-power competition can not only obscure important differences between competitors but also lead policymakers to overemphasize military power as an instrument to advance U.S. interests. At a time when states are likely to seek competitive advantage primarily through nonmilitary means, this view would reinforce the imbalance in U.S.strategy between military and nonmilitary instruments of power. military adventurism is strikingly rare. Today’s versions of rivalry and competition almost always play out in the economic, political, cultural, and informational spheres— not on the battlefield.

This is not to say military power plays no role in current competitions. It surely does, as a means of coercion and a backdrop to other efforts. But this is a vastly different role than military power played, for example, for France, the Habsburg dynasty, Japan, or Prussia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Anyone seeking evidence need look no further than defense-spending levels of most major powers today, which have remained stubbornly low.

The strategy of the United States’ leading rival—China— is therefore to advance its interests primarily through economic, geopolitical, and informational means. Military power certainly backs up some of China’s ambitions, such as in the South China Sea and in its belligerent posture toward Taiwan. But China’s activities today pale in comparison with earlier forms of great-power military aggression, which often involved existential threats to

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Finally and most perilous, a great-power competition frame risks forfeiting the immense power that comes from heading a largely aligned group of rule-following states. The United States is already showing signs that it no longer values its role as leader of the international order it has shaped since the end of World War II. If Washington thinks of itself as one desperate, selfinterested geopolitical chess player among many, grasping for temporary and transactional advantages, that role will likely further diminish. The United States would do far better to continue leading the group of nations that holds the predominant share of global economic and military power, is bound together by a dense network of institutions, and remains committed to certain norms, such as those against military aggression and economic predation. To abandon this role would be to walk away from the greatest competitive advantage any great power has ever known. *MICHAEL J. MAZARR is a Senior Political Scientist at the RAND Corporation.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

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Demystifying Belt and Road The Struggle to Define China’s “Project of the Century”

By Yuen Yuen Ang* In May 2017, Beijing hosted the first Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation. The summit, which gathered representatives of more than 100 countries, had been organized to promote Chinese President Xi Jinping’s signature foreign policy: the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), an ambitious vision to expand Beijing’s investment and trade ties with some 65 other countries that collectively cover two-thirds of the world’s population. In his keynote speech at the summit, Xi hailed BRI as “the project of the century.”

“What we hope to create,” he said, “is a big family of harmonious

coexistence.”

Yet the effects of BRI have been anything but harmonious.

Chinese-backed railway projects in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand have stalled, as Beijing’s partner governments have complained about excessive costs, corruption, and what Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad has termed “a new version of colonialism.” Analysts have criticized Beijing for practicing “debt-trap diplomacy”— using BRI as cover to extend astronomical loans that will leave its partners beholden to Chinese interests. American diplomats routinely accuse Beijing of “predatory lending,” and last October, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo

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There is one problem with the current hysteria surrounding BRI: nobody, including in Beijing, knows what BRI really is. recently tarnished the image of Xi’s signature project.

UNDERSTANDING BRI

Wang Yilin, Chairman of China National Petroleum Corporation, speaks during the Belt And Road CEO Conference as part of the second Belt and Road Forum (BRF) at China National Convention Center on April 2019 ,25 in Beijing, China.

(Getty)

referred to BRI as a Chinese attempt to buy an “empire.”

There is one problem with the current hysteria surrounding BRI: nobody, including in Beijing, knows what BRI really is.

In his 2017 keynote, Xi described “the project of the century” as encompassing nearly everything: finance, infrastructure, innovation, trade, transportation, sustainability, and people-topeople connectivity. The Chinese government has never provided an official definition of what constitutes a BRI project, nor has it issued a list of approved BRI participants. As a result, Chinese interest groups of all stripes—local governments, state-owned corporations, private enterprises, universities, and even charities and nongovernmental organizations—have been able to claim that their pet projects are a part of BRI, whether or not they have official government support. BRI may be the most talked about and least defined buzzword of this decade.

China is currently attempting to revamp and rebrand BRI in response to global criticism. To do so successfully, it will have to clarify the purpose, priorities, and scope of the initiative. It should define specific BRI projects, allowing only those that meet sufficiently high standards of quality, transparency, and accountability to claim the initiative’s mantle. By removing the confusion around BRI, China may begin to regain the trust of the international community while heading off speculations that have

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BRI has always been hazily defined. A 2017 essay published in China Daily offers a sense of the official language that has typically surrounded the initiative. According to the authors, both Chinese policy advisers based at Tsinghua University, BRI represents “the integration of spiritual and material human abilities to understand the world, change the world, and profoundly shape the destiny of humanity.” What this is supposed to mean in policy terms is an enigma, to say the least.

Theoretical vagueness translates, on the ground, into practical confusion. Let me offer a concrete example from my research in Sihanoukville, a beach town in Cambodia that has become a symbol of contention over BRI. In recent years, this town of 150,000 residents has seen an influx of Chinese workers, contractors, and tourists, not to mention a deluge of Chinese investment—1.1$ billion in 2018 alone. Casinos and condos have cropped up everywhere. Existing infrastructure can hardly keep up with the frantic pace of construction: the town’s streets are covered with accumulated garbage and flooded with water from burst pipes. Although a minority of local residents profit immensely by renting out properties to Chinese investors, many others have been crowded out by soaring prices. The result has been a rise in anti-Chinese sentiments. For Cambodians—as well as the international media—all of these disruptions fall under the heading of BRI. Yet for all the Chinese money and investors in Sihanoukville, only a few projects there are definitively part of BRI, understood in the narrow sense as projects funded by the Chinese state in order to promote bilateral cooperation or development. One such project is an expressway, currently under construction, linking Sihanoukville to the capital city of Phnom Penh. State-backed Chinese loans finance the road, at a projected 2$ billion, and a state-owned Chinese company is building it. Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, has declared the expressway “a key project under BRI cooperation.”

Yet other projects are more ambiguous, such as the Sihanoukville Special Economic Zone (SSEZ), an industrial park that employs about 20,000 workers. On its website, the Chinese Ministry of Commerce describes SSEZ as “an important cooperation project between Cambodia and China,” but unlike the expressway, it is a joint venture between private

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Cambodian and Chinese companies.

Even less directly connected to BRI are the Chinese casinos and condos that now fill Sihanoukville. These are mostly private investments seeking quick profit and speculative gains, rather than projects to promote development or improve ties between Beijing and Phnom Penh. And not all the investment comes from the mainland: some of the investors in Sihanoukville are from Hong Kong, Macau, and Malaysia. But local residents often do not distinguish between state and private investment or among ethnically Chinese investors from different countries—in their eyes, if it’s Chinese, it’s BRI. Ambiguity about what does and does not count as a BRI project goes beyond single cases such as Sihanoukville; it also affects databases that foreign analysts use to track BRI. The data set constructed by the Center for Global Development, for instance, relies on Chinese media publications to identify BRI projects, leaving out smaller projects not profiled by the media.

The China-Africa Loan Database measures Chinese loans to Africa, excluding investment and privately funded projects.

The Reconnecting Asia Database covers major infrastructure projects in Asia yet omits industrial parks such as the SSEZ. The wide range of definitions adopted by analysts of BRI has led the political scientist Nick Bisley to argue that “China’s sprawling infrastructure program has become a test of attitudes that tells us more about the analyst than BRI.”

THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL The confusion surrounding BRI defies a stereotype of China’s leadership as strategic and coherent. Because China is an autocracy, many assume that its leaders formulate farsighted grand strategies, which subordinates work to faithfully execute.

The reality is typically the opposite. National agendas are formulated at the top and proclaimed by leaders, often using proverbs and analogies (think former Paramount Leader Deng Xiaoping’s signature slogan, “Crossing the river by touching the stones”). Yet implementation is left to a litany of committees,

China rose from an impoverished communist country to a capitalist superpower on the strength of its pragmatism and adaptability— the two qualities that should guide BRI 2.0.

ministries, and local governments, which are tasked with translating the grand vision into concrete policies and projects.

This arrangement makes it easy for domestic interest groups to use a national policy as cover to pursue their own agenda, for instance by creating BRI projects to secure procurement deals and cheap loans.

As BRI is only six years old, its formulation naturally extends upon domestic-policy-making traditions. One of these traditions is the “policy campaign.” Whereas technocratic democracies pass laws and then implement them in a routine manner, China tends to make policies in a “campaign” style, in which the top commander mobilizes bureaucrats, entrepreneurs, and even ordinary citizens toward a single vision. These campaigns have the advantage of inspiring mass participation and achieving quick results, but the scale and speed of the action they inspire, combined with a lack of coordination, usually produce a string of blunders. When problems grow too serious to ignore, the leadership is forced to adjust. BRI displays the characteristic pattern of such a campaign: vision setting, mass mobilization, and subsequent recalibration.

Another domestic-policy-making tradition, as my own research shows, is deliberate ambiguity. Chinese leaders often speak— and formulate directives—in vague or even cryptic terms. For example, the central guiding document for BRI from 2015 to 2017 was only seven pages long and sketched broad principles such as “go where the demand is” and “share responsibilities and progress together,” rather than providing a detailed plan.

Ambiguity leaves policies open to interpretation, allowing them

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This photo taken on December 2018 ,14 shows the facilities of Sihanoukville port in Sihanoukville, the coastal capital of Preah Sihanouk province.

(Getty)

THE ROAD AHEAD

to be adapted to different conditions and gradually fine-tuned as leaders figure out their plans. But when this deliberate ambiguity is carried over into the formulation of a sweeping global policy such as BRI, it creates misunderstandings overseas that lie beyond Beijing’s anticipation or control.

Countries that participate in BRI, for instance, do not know whether the initiative is primarily about building infrastructure, promoting trade, extending Chinese loans, establishing new standards, or broadcasting Chinese soft power. They cannot enforce accountability because they cannot evaluate BRI projects according to their purported aims. Indeed, they do not even know for certain which projects fall under BRI. This vagueness provides fertile ground for suspicion and speculation, such as claims that China deliberately wants BRI projects to fail in order to seize strategic assets from debtors.

Beijing’s failure to manage BRI’s brand has also emboldened opportunists within China to take advantage of the initiative for self-promotion and enrichment, with global consequences. In June 2017, the party committee on BRI met to discuss precisely this problem: “misusing BRI to extract profits.” It gave a list of examples: some companies appropriated BRI’s name to advertise financial products and investment funds; others organized so-called BRI conventions to raise funds and charge exorbitant fees; and a few even created fake websites that imitated the official BRI website in order to drum up business.

These misuses, said the committee, have harmed the initiative’s brand overseas.

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Facing a global outcry over BRI, Beijing is now shifting gears from a hazily defined BRI 1.0 to a more fine-tuned BRI 2.0. At a 2018 symposium marking the fifth year of BRI, Xi described this transition, using an analogy from Chinese painting, as a switch from xieyi, freehand painting for outlining broad strokes, to gongbi, the careful inscription of details. Revealingly, during his April speech at the second BRI forum, Xi used two new keywords that were absent from his speech at the 2017 forum: “priorities” and “execution.” He dropped the phrase “the project of the century.”

If China is serious about improving BRI, however, it will need to go beyond a change in rhetoric and take at least three concrete steps. The first, already implicit in Xi’s speech, is to choose its priorities. BRI cannot be everything. Beijing needs to narrow down its objectives and focus on achieving them. Three priorities stood out at the 2019 forum: open consultation, clean governance, and green (environmentally friendly) projects.

Along with narrowing its priorities, Beijing must take steps to clarify the scope of BRI. It should establish standards of quality, transparency, and accountability and issue an official list of BRI projects that meet these standards. Chinese policymakers may already be planning this move: in April, Bloomberg reported that Beijing was drafting rules for which projects should be considered part of BRI and “working on a list of legitimate Belt and Road Initiative projects officially acknowledged by the Chinese government.”

Finally, China should seek to improve the quality of BRI by working with other countries to develop pilot projects.

Sihanoukville, for example, could benefit from a relatively lowcost pilot to fix broken roads that focused on consulting with local communities. These pilots would test out policies on a small scale, generating lessons that can then be scaled up to larger projects. Reform-era China has long used pilots to experiment with domestic policies, as it did in 1980 with the creation of a special economic zone in Shenzhen. In the context of BRI, such small-scale experimentation will allow Beijing to discover what works before sinking money and diplomatic capital into more ambitious projects. In fact, the principle of using pilots to “scale from point to surface” was already highlighted in Beijing’s 17–2015 guiding document on BRI, but it has not yet been implemented.

Chinese leaders who invoke history as a guide need not go as far back as the age of the Silk Road. They should instead look to the more recent past. China rose from an impoverished communist country to a capitalist superpower on the strength of its pragmatism and adaptability—the two qualities that should guide BRI 2.0. *YUEN YUEN ANG is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan and the author of How China Escaped the Poverty Trap.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

A Weekly Political News Magazine

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Issue 1750 - May - 31/05/2019

I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream www.majalla.com

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Jokha Al-Harthi - Man Booker International Prize Winner

Al-Harthi is the First Female Omani Novelist to be Translated into English Majalla - London Illustration by Ali Minadalou 1 - Omani-born Jokha Al-Harthi received her PhD in Classical Arabic Poetry at the University of Edinburgh in 2010 and currently teaches at Sultan Qaboos University in Oman’s capital Muscat. She has published two collections of short fiction, a children’s book, a volume of prose and poetry, three Arabic novel, as well as academic books and articles.

2 - Her work has been published in translation, in English for Banipal Magazine and in German for Lisan Magazine, and in Korean, Serbian and Italian for specialist magazines.

She has been shortlisted for the Sheikh Zayed Award for Young Writers and her novel Naranja (2016) won the 2016 Sultan Qaboos Award for Culture, Art and Literature.

3 - In April 2019, Al-Harthi was

nominated was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, making history by becoming the first author from the GCC to be in the running for the prestigious award which recognises the writer’s body of work rather than any one title.

4 - In May 2019, she accomplished two more records by winning the award, making he the first Arablanguage writer to get the prize and the first Omani author ever to have a novel, Celestial Bodies, translated from Arabic into English.

The book, which won the 2010 Best Omani Novel Award, tells the coming-of-age story of three sisters in the Omani village of Al-Awafi confronting its slave-owning past and a complex modern world. AlHarthi says came up with the idea for the book while studying for her PhD at Edinburgh University when she felt homesick and took to writing about people in Oman.

In particular, the story focuses on

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middle-class Omanis trying to come to terms with major changes to their way of life. «It touches the subject of slavery. I think literature is the best platform to have this dialogue,” she said. Al-Harthi said her win is a victory meant “a window has been opened to Arabic literature.”

5 - In regards to being the first Omani nominee, Jokha said: “I hope this helps international readers discover that Oman has an active and talented writing community who live and work for their art. They take on sacrifices and struggles and find joy in writing, or in art, much the same way as anywhere else.

This is something the whole world has in common. Omanis, through their writing, invite others to look at Oman with an open mind and heart.

No matter where you are, love, loss, friendship, pain and hope are the same feelings and humanity still has a lot of work to do to believe in this truth.”

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I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream Is It Possible to Take Edvard Munch Seriously?

By Bryn Haworth When I claimed recently that Jonathan Jones, the prolific art critic for The Guardian, used the same method as Boris Johnson when writing his articles, I was, of course, indulging in banter. There is no evidence that Jones writes two articles about every exhibition he sees, one in praise of the artist and the other in dispraise, then tosses them in the air till one or the other lands face up and chooses that article for publication. The truth is that Boris Johnson – or BoJo, as he was known before his rise to eminence – had a very weighty issue to decide when he did this, viz. how to become Prime Minister. Nothing less would have induced him to write two articles for the price of one.

As for Jonathan Jones, I hope I shall not be considered too critical a critic – a critic’s critic, even – if I say that this method of deciding what he likes or dislikes is far too cumbersome for the everyday needs of an art critic, especially one as prolific as this critic, and that he does, of course, something far simpler the moment he gets out of the hushed confines of the gallery: he tosses a coin.

The result in the case of Edvard Munch, whose work is currently to be seen at the British Museum, was very good for Munch, but a disaster for art criticism. Having droned on about the artist’s life, a sure sign in any such piece of a lack of anything better to say, telling us how tragic it was, how he was an itinerant bohemian, how he never recovered from various bereavements and addictions, Jones attempts to conclude his critique with a flourish, an uplifting paragraph of rhetorical magnificence. He is, naturally, trying to sound

profound about the one work by Munch that everyone has seen and which no one finds profound any more, if they ever did, ‘The Scream’: It is a work of art that abolishes the distance between us.

Even as he portrays despair and loneliness and death, Munch does so in a way that celebrates our ability to communicate with each other. He leaves you harrowed yet inspired. This is an exhibition that shows why we need art. How else can we hear each other scream?

I scream, you scream, we all scream. For ice cream.

It was at this point that I did just that – I screamed.

Thankfully, no one heard me, least of all Jonathan Jones.

Because I hate to alarm the neighbours, I screamed silently.

It’s just as well JoJo will never learn about my inward screaming as you know what he’d say: “Aha, you see, that’s my whole point. That’s why we need art. How else can we hear each other scream?”

At the risk of exaggeration, this final sentence in his article on Munch is the worst JoJo has ever come up with, which is why I dearly wish it had been tails, not heads, and that he’d written one of his stinging diatribes against the Norwegian artist, rather than leaving that job to me, but also because the world would never have been exposed to such an appalling sentence. Too late. The world must try to cope.

It is so bad, that sentence, because it is so far from an accurate definition of why we need art, and so random an answer to that obvious riddle, that it makes one wonder if we actually do need it. Fortunately, I was able to catch the Bonnard exhibition at Tate Modern a few days before I attended the Munch and, therefore, I knew that art could

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Munch seems like a young person’s painter. Not too young, as he can be very graphic and shocking, but younger than the man in red. Adolescence would be about right.

Sick Mood at Sunset

do other, better things, and that even if I could easily have done without Bonnard, it was quite nice to have spent some time in his company. Bonnard the artist that is. I was utterly indifferent to Bonnard the man. I entirely ignored some black and white footage they had of him. As a man he might have been insufferably egotistical – let’s face it, the odds are he was, being an artist – and quite possibly gloomy, but the paintings don’t convey that idea. Bonnard the artist is the ultimate sunny optimist, though without being facile or sentimental.

So much for Bonnard. You could not imagine a style more antipathetic to the introspective musings of the Norwegian, or further removed from the angst that was promised (and delivered, along with a dollop of love) by the British Museum. The problem with all this symbolist brooding and Nordic noir is that it thinks it’s being profound. And yet, Skrik (as the artist called it, once he’d pared the image down, a word closer to the English ‘shriek’) is only as profound as you make it. On a certain level, it’s a crude piece that verges on caricature and could easily be dismissed as, well, facile or sentimental.

‘But how can you say that?’ I hear you cry. ‘How can

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you possibly say ‘The Scream’ is not profound?’ I shall go one further, and I am not alone in stating this, no one actually sees the thing any longer. People compare it to Mona Lisa for this one reason – unless I’m mistaken and they see both pictures as searching portraits of the human condition – that it has become over-familiar to the point where we can no longer see it. Or, as Siri Hustvedt put in the New York Times (they don’t mince their words, those New York Times critics): As with the ‘Mona Lisa,’ whatever it may have meant to those who first saw it, the canvas has been buried under layer upon layer of cultural excrement.

In other words, she thinks of it as covered in shit. Compare what might happen, eventually, to a statue in a pigeon-filled square, were there no guardians around to cleanse our doors of perception: the proud features of whatever general or mercenary was represented would one day be obliterated, and the plinth would appear to be occupied by a grey, featureless stalagmite of… culture.

I suppose we critics are among the dirtiest pigeons in this analogy. Even as we add to the quantity of grey stuff, we participate in the general blindness to what lies underneath.

This phenomenon – which, being more decorous than Ms Hustvedt, I shall euphemistically refer to as ‘the guano syndrome’ – was perfectly illustrated even as I approached the version of The Screech in this exhibition. I had to pause, not in resistance to the irresistible pull of the picture, but because a young man in red was standing athwart the print, with his back to it, taking a selfie. Blithely unaware of the museum’s health warnings about angst, he was smiling with unconstrained delight while the screaming face on the bridge, like the Mona Lisa on such occasions, failed miserably to photobomb him. The young man then sent this shot of himself beaming around the world on some social media platform or other, and I mean beaming, since his expression could not have been in more stark contrast to the angst-ridden screamer. ‘Ah,’ I mused, sagely, ‘that’s why we need technology. How else could we see each other beam?’

What unites me, in my indifference to the picture, and the blithe young man in his incongruous joy, and anyone else on whom the picture no longer casts the appropriate

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spell, is the sheer quantity of culture covering it. A similar difficulty afflicts Scandinavians, but for them its far worse.

In fact, I have a hunch the young man was a Scandinavian, his whole attitude betrayed such extreme over-familiarity.

The accretion of guano starts from a very early age in that part of the world. Take David Lagercrantz, a Swedish journalist and author of an award-winning sports biography.

He claims to have grown up with the image of ‘The Scream’ engraved on my brain, just like every other Scandinavian.

Every six- or seven-year-old kid has to try and paint their own version of it in school. I remember going to parties where you had to stand behind a giant copy of the painting, put your face through a hole in the middle of it and have your photograph taken (The Observer, 24 March 2019) The picture, one suspects, has been subjected to greater indignities than Mona Lisa ever had to endure. So what if Duchamp gave her a moustache? In Sweden, they have turned Munch’s masterpiece into a cheap seaside joke. The familiarity of the image has made it almost impossible to take seriously, which may be why anyone attempting to do so resorts to Jonathan Jones levels of banality, like Lin Ullmann, daughter of Liv, who really ought to know better: ‘The Scream’ feels more resonant than ever these days because that haunted face is what we all wake up making every day. You hear the word Brexit or you see Donald Trump’s face in the newspaper and there you go, ‘The Scream’ is where you are (The Observer 24 March 2019) So ubiquitous, so over-familiar, has Munch’s image of angst become, it’s something a Norwegian impersonates when they hear the word Brexit. Can anyone actually see this picture anymore? It begins to make the Turin shroud seem over-exposed, and the public only get to see that once in a decade.

You begin to wonder if this is the price of success in the field of art: invisibility mitigated by banality. But what about Karl Ove Knausgaard, the celebrated, long-winded, confessional Norwegian writer? He actually curated an exhibition of the great man’s tree pictures. I know, but best not enquire, the explanation is likely to take some time. Surely, Mr Knausgaard could still look at the picture without thinking of Trump or the drawings he did at school.

He would see it for what it is, a sensitive soul like him. Here is Knausgaard describing his first encounter with Munch at the age of seventeen: It is not anti-intellectual, but it has nothing to do with intellect. It grips you. And you want that existential dimension to art at that age. (Observer, 24 March 2019) At seventeen, yes. This is part of the problem, I think.

Munch seems like a young person’s painter. Not too young, as he can be very graphic and shocking, but younger than the man in red. Adolescence would be about right. Knausgaard

seems to agree, but he goes on to speculate that Munch fits well into an instant age where images flit across people’s retinas and are more powerful if they can be comprehended quickly.

One of the reasons ‘The Scream’ was so shocking when Munch first painted it was that all distance is removed and there is no space between you and the image. It’s instant emotion. That was revolutionary in the 1890s, when there were all kinds of barriers in paintings. But now we live in an instant time, so Munch feels incredibly relevant and contemporary. (Observer, 24 March 2019) And yet, he doesn’t. If he did, we might pay more attention to him. What Knausgaard is saying sounds plausible, but I don’t think it’s true. Munch’s art had the very opposite effect on me, of tired familiarity, of an art that was trapped in its own time, not universal at all. Munch frets about things, he seems to be agonising over the meaning of life,

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The ‘thousand-yard stare’ – as pictured

by Don McCullin

Jealousy, detail

he presents us with broad brush emotions and melodramatic feelings. When he paints a beautiful Madonna, he spoils it by adding a foetus staring out, and then makes things worse by adding spermatozoa wriggling around the frame. It’s so gauche it would shame the average seventeen-year-old. The overwhelming emotion for me at the end of all this was fatigue.

In my book [Knausgaard goes on] I talk quite a lot about how we don’t see ‘The Scream’ any more. But while I was curating the Oslo exhibition, a German TV team came to film me putting it together and asked if they could see ‘The Scream’ with no glass, no frame, just completely naked. Looking at it like that, I saw for the first time what an incredibly wild painting it is and how good it is – and how fresh when everything around it is removed. So, if you really look you can still see the meaning of it: the picture remains alive. (Observer, 24 March 2019) So, once we’ve got its clothes off, does it turn out the picture stands for the anxiety of modern man, or for the emptiness of human life? Had Munch experienced an epiphany, or was he just having a funny turn? Was this the real life? Was this just fantasy?

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I shall not pretend that what Mr Knausgaard goes on (and, by the Nordic gods, does he go on) to say got me any closer to ‘the meaning of it’. Sometimes one’s only recourse is to try looking at the object in question with one’s own eyes, so that is what I decided to do. As soon as the young man in red had successfully cheered up his friends and loved ones, he was gone. A gap, a window of opportunity, emerged. There was scarcely a punter in sight. I decided the woman to my left with blond hair, probably a Norwegian, was no threat; she’d be so far gone she wouldn’t even notice the picture on the wall. There was, like, literally no queue for the privileged spot in front of the object, so I strode boldly up to it and did what no one has done for years, maybe decades, possibly since the percipient Andy Warhol had a go. Adopting the resolute attitude of a guano miner, I looked at it.

TRYING TO LOOK AT THE SCREAM Just looking is not as straight-forwardly revelatory as it sounds. Try looking at Stonehenge, for instance. So, I started with what the ads call ‘the science bit’. I wanted to mine through the guano for the original purpose behind the image, and this meant recovering the details of Munch’s hinterland.

The British Museum’s exhibit is a lithograph, no more than seven or eight inches in height, depicting the famous scene on a bridge with the sky above, two figures in the background, and at the centre of it all a strangely quivering figure with an oval mouth that seems to betoken dismay, its hands clasping its ears, the head and face vaguely adumbrated, so that there is the suggestion of a skull.

The curator’s note tells you that Munch might have been inspired by a Peruvian mummy he’d seen in Paris.

The image was in black and white, but I knew of course that it was only one of many iterations. Munch was always returning to images, not least because he wanted to turn them into prints, and he was apt to change the palette of his images too, though in this case the redness of the sky was crucial, as evidenced by his account of the actual occasion that had inspired the picture.

The title was also unstable. In an early manifestation, when the central figure was more realistically depicted as a well-dressed man in suit and trilby hat, leaning towards the ‘fence’ mentioned in his diary entry and staring down, possibly into the depths of the fjord, thus… …the image was entitled ‘Sick Mood at Sunset’, a title which places all the emphasis on the subjective quality of the experience. Then, as Munch revolved the figure by forty-five degrees to face us, he changed the title to one in German, Der Schrei der Natur, in keeping with the original inspiration of the image: I was walking along the road with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused,

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feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature (Nice, 22 January 1892) Given that this diary entry was written in France and yet we know the scene is located in Oslo, he was clearly recalling the experience. Like Bonnard, therefore, he was in the habit of painting and drawing memories, and as with the French artist’s work, this had the effect of altering the colours of recollected scenes; but the one colour that persists through the different versions, when there are colours at all, is this scary red.

The problem with this picture, then, is not that we know too little, but that what we know is full of contradictions.

Take the fact that, in the anecdote, nature is shrieking or screaming. This sounds like a simple throwback to what John Ruskin deprecated in the Romantics as ‘pathetic fallacy’, the personification of nature and projection onto it of human feelings. But a confusion arises from the mouth of the main figure. Owing to its shape, just about everybody assumes the figure is doing the screaming. To correct this ambiguity, one can only experiment with the idea of the mouth being closed.

As for landscape, instead of what Ruskin would call pathetic fallacy, it is possible that the concept of the sublime is closer to Munch’s intentions. In philosophy (Kant’s, for example), the sublime leads to sensations of terror and pleasure combined. A severe thunderstorm can have this effect. For Munch, it was an especially gory sunset, but without the pleasure.

Another aspect of ‘The Scream’ is synaesthesia. If we count Munch among the Symbolist artists of his day, then this would have been an experience he prized. The Symbolist poets sought to identify and confound the separate senses of sound and sight, even of smell. In Baudelaire›s poem Correspondences, for instance – There are perfumes that are fresh like children›s flesh, sweet like oboes, green like meadows

Munch is conveying, in a rather cartoonish, almost comical fashion, the idea of panic. So, the right eye of the figure strays too far right for the left eye to keep up.

– And others, corrupt, rich, and triumphant, having the expansiveness of infinite things, like amber, musk, benzoin, and incense, which sing of the raptures of the soul and senses.

The confusion of sight with hearing accounts for the way Munch’s strangely anonymous figure, suddenly overwhelmed by the lurid redness of the sky, seems to hear it rather than see it. His hands clutch at his ears in an attempt to block the piercing sound. Baudelaire’s word ‘infinite’ also occurs in Munch’s diary entry. The kind of epiphany we are seeing in ‘The Scream’ is cosmic in scale. It is a cry of pain from creation itself. Symbolists didn’t mess about when it came to the sublime. They actively pursued it. But here, the sublime has got too much for one of their number.

We are looking at a Symbolist reduced to jelly.

It is no accident that the exhibition includes two portraits of Nietzsche, the German philosopher who Munch appears to have admired most and who wrote at length on the sublime. Though the artist may not have traced the concept back through Schopenhauer and Burke to Immanuel Kant, he has obviously picked up something from the tradition

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Tingle-Tangle, a cheap form of cabaret in Berlin

The Scream Eyes

Yellow Scream

of nature’s potential to terrify. At an earlier stage, when the image still had a German title, the connection between the angst of the figure and the horror of a natural event was more explicit.

The figure is really the most iconic aspect of this persistent image, yet there is something oddly childish about the way

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Munch chose to depict the face. It is masklike, a caricature without personality. No one ever really looked like this, including the artist. Any remnant of self-portraiture in ‘Sick Mood at Sunset’ has disappeared, to be replaced by a kind of generic arrangement of eyes, nose and mouth. What is this creature? It is like an alien or a robot. It’s a reduced version of a human. The shape of the body is boneless, sinuous, imitative of the landscape or perhaps inseparable from it. From a picture that had to be explained by a diary entry, Munch has created an impression of the feeling of helpless collapse. That body, one feels, will not be able to stand up much longer by its own volition. It has a look of perilous instability. But worse than this imminent collapse is the expression on the face, and especially in the eyes.

JoJo once stated that ‘the screamer did not look at the mad sky but directly at us. It is us.’ Well, no. I have already demonstrated that the figure cannot conclusively be said to be screaming, and more to the point, Jones is not looking at the eyes. From the description he gives one would expect a kind of nineteenth century version of the thousand-yard stare: But this is not the case. In fact, the creature before us is boss-eyed. He seems to be suffering from strabismus. I don’t think this is an accident, nor is it a medical complaint.

Munch is conveying, in a rather cartoonish, almost comical fashion, the idea of panic. So, the right eye of the figure strays too far right for the left eye to keep up. By this trick, the artist manages to introduce animation into the look as the viewer has the same difficulty focusing as the person before them. This was not a trick unique to ‘The Scream’.

In 1895, a couple of years after this image of horror, Munch employed the technique again. This time, the figure is that of a jealous man. In the background we see a woman, almost naked, greeting a fully-dressed man in what looks like the act of offering herself to him. The man in the foreground whose face stares out at us, also has strabismus, though this time it suggests that he sees nothing in front of him, his gaze is inward, fixated on the imagined sexual surrender of the

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beloved woman: Who can doubt that the expression in Jealousy has essentially the same function as the one in ‘The Scream’, to portray a gaze turned inwards upon the self, oblivious to reality?

In exactly the same way as the jealous man, the dismayed individual on the bridge is no longer experiencing reality the way normal people do, hence the contrast with the two receding figures. This is definitely an inner state we are being presented with, rather in the way the novel was about to present us with the stream of consciousness.

You may not like getting inside the head of this caricature human being, but that’s where Munch takes us. The fact that he has clearly exaggerated the features to the point of comedy is perhaps the great achievement of the picture. He might easily have avoided this degree of caricature, portraying the man on the bridge in a similar way to the jealous man, yet he opted for something far more grotesque. There is an element of silliness in the result which, though it isn’t unique in his work, contrasts sharply with the grim sombreness of so many of the other pictures in the exhibition; the vampire women, say, or the lovers almost merging into corporate beings with desire. It is only in a picture of a cabaret in Germany that we see what Munch could also have done.

He displayed, as Picasso would one day, a real gift for caricature.

It is this wit in these swiftly drawn portraits that brings me to the comic aspect of ‘The Scream’, because despite all the intellectual baggage, the aesthetic theory, the possible references to breakdown, even the proximity of the scene to a mental home and a slaughterhouse, I really wonder if we have to take it so seriously, or if anyone, even Munch, ever did.

This one, consciously or unconsciously, really turns up the volume on the blood red hues, almost as if Warhol knew exactly what he was doing.

There is not a lot more in common between these two artists beyond their means of production, and this is just as well, since we would not otherwise have got the wonderfully meaningless comment by Patricia Berman, writer of the

An Inflatable Tube Man

LOOKING AGAIN AT THE SCREAM ‘Andy Warhol looks a scream Hang him on my wall…’ David Bowie It’s odd, and not many people know it, but in all the years of the picture’s fame, arguably the best attempt to see it was made by Andy Warhol. This is fitting too, since both artists had an obsession with repeating images, using printing methods to multiply them. Hence Warhol is paying homage to a fellow printer when he takes ‘The Scream’ and does to it what he has already done to Monroe or the notorious cans of soup. Thus, he acknowledges the dead Norwegian’s pop artistry avant la lettre. Here’s an example: It’s noticeable how little Warhol has felt the need to tinker with the original. He has, however, broken the link made in the diary entry between the blood red of the sunset and the shriek. Does this matter? Here’s another version he did in 1984, which sold for 5.5$ million in 2014:

Second Warhol

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catalogue for Munch/Warhol and the Multiple Image in 2013, that “If Warhol offered himself up as surface, Munch was all impenetrable depth.” After pondering this gnomic remark for some seconds, I was forced to conclude that superficiality and impenetrability amount to the same thing.

You learn something new &c.

Warhol made more drastic alterations to Munch’s ‘Madonna’, ‘The Brooch, Eva Mudocci,’ and ‘SelfPortrait.’ With ‘The Scream’, he seems to have restrained

Red Scream

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himself, content to ring the changes on the colours he used.

Others have not been so discreet. Twenty-five years ago, Robert Fishbone came up with an inflatable version of ‘The Scream’ and has never looked back. To date he has sold 450,000 copies of it in twenty countries. His website promises to ease the tribulations of modern life, ‘whether you are stressed out by politics, the workplace, global warming, a relationship or the rapid pace of technology’.

I’m thinking of emulating Fishbone, but the boneless floppiness of the original would be my chief inspiration, and I would do it not from motives of naked commercial greed, but to do Munch a favour. As I see it, we’ll probably never know if the image is tragic or comic, or even tragicomic, any more than we will ever know what they used to get up to in Stonehenge. The point is to be able to see how extraordinary Stonehenge is, not to pretend you’re a druid.

With Munch, we can only hope to see his masterpiece if it becomes strange again. Like the Russian formalists used to say, it has to be estranged. Simply looking at the picture as Munch intended is beyond us. Knausgaard was right, the image is no longer visible. After almost a minute spent scrutinising it, before another punter finally came along to break my reverie, I was really no closer to seeing it. I didn’t even know whether it was clever to have drawn this parody of a human face to communicate whatever he was trying to communicate, or if indeed he was trying to communicate anything.

Which is why I am in favour of the Fishbone inflatables, and of mugs, and T-shirts, and all the gift shop trash which has made such a comprehensive mockery of the original intention behind the image. Since that intention is now irredeemably lost, never to be recovered, I have decided to design my own Scream as a dancing, flailing tube man of the kind that smiles inanely in shopping malls, gas stations and car showrooms across the length and breadth of America.

It’s what Munch would have wanted. They flop down periodically and then rise again, flailing their arms about.

Mine will not flail its arms about, obviously. It will have its hands over its ears. Otherwise, it will pretty much mimic the spasmodic movements of its more cheerful forbears.

Apparently, these crazy ‘tube guys’ are not just aesthetically pleasing and hilarious, but …vertical inflatables also make for good scarecrows.

Farmer Gary Long […] says that bird damage in his orchard of honey crisp apples went from 20,000 pounds a year to zero (Slate, 3 December 2014) Imagine how much more efficient one of Munch’s tube guys would be. The crows would not just get scared; they’d actually begin to experience angst. I should be able to flog these tubes to art lovers and irate farmers alike, and you know what, I shall be doing Munch a favour, because I’ll be making his overfamiliar icon visible again.

‘Edvard Munch: love and angst’ is at the British Museum until 21 July 2019.

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Saudi Arabia’s Buzzing Visual Arts Scene Contemporary Artists Offer Glimpses into their Country’s Identity and Heritage with Striking Works

by Yasmine El-Geressi Saudi Arabia has been changing -rapidly - and art and culture are playing a pivotal role in this significant social shift. Last year Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman launched the creation of the Misk Art Institute, an artistic-lead organisation operating under the auspices of the state-funded Misk Foundation.

In 2017, King Salman inaugurated the Snøhettadesigned King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture in Dammam. The bold initiative was developed by the Saudi Aramco oil company to promote cultural development within the Kingdom. Meanwhile, Art Jameel announced the construction of a new development to open in winter of 2020-2019 named

Hayy: Creative Hub which will house a theatre, exhibition, event spaces and artists’ studios, as well as spaces for 12 partner organisations. This eruption of art creativity comes as the government announced a projected 64$ billion investment, in partnership with the private sector, into cultural infrastructure over the coming decade.

With a thriving art scene within Saudi Arabia and the Kingdom’s return to the Venice Biennale this year (11 May - 24 Novmember) after an -8year hiatus, as well as international museums dedicated to the country’s art, the profile of Saudi art looks set to continue rising. Here is a look at some of its most exciting and pioneering contemporary artists:

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A woman looks at Saudi artist Ahmed Mater's "Magnetism IV" during an exhibition dedicated to Saudi Arabia's King Salman's first official trip to Russia, downtown Moscow on October 2017 ,5. (Getty)

AHMED MATER Hailing from Abha, the capital of Asia province in Saudi Arabia, Ahmed Mater is one of the most influential artists from the kingdom and has been integral to the establishment of the country’s artists on the global scene. A man of many masks, as he puts it, Mater is also a qualified GP, a landscape photographer, and the face of one of the region’s largest mobile phone companies.

Mater remains rooted in his local identity. Embracing diverse media, his art incorporates both social critique and respect for religion in an era of globalisation, consumerism and urbanisation.

He entwines expressive and politically engaged artistic claims with the scientific objectives of his medical training, enmeshing the two realms to explore their connections and contradictions. His socially engaged artistic practice is furthered through his involvement in cultural initiatives inside and beyond the Kingdom, including Al-Meftaha Arts Village, Abha; pharan.studio, Jeddah. In 2003, he co-founded the Edge of Arabia collective, aimed at expanding knowledge of and support for contemporary Middle Eastern art and culture to a global audience. The initiative has connected a new generation of Saudi artists with international audiences. His work has also been on display in galleries across he globe.

Mater’s installation at the British Museum in 2012, Magnetism, conveyed one of the most essential elements

of Hajj, that all Muslims are considered in the eyes of God whether rich, poor, young or old. He used tens of thousands of Iron filings placed within the magnetic fields of two magnets, only the upper one of which is visible. The iron filings represent a unified body of pilgrims all of whom are attracted to the Ka’ba as the centre of their world.

In 2016, he captured the often unseen side of Mecca during the hajj season - the migrant workers, the tireless construction and the eye-opening sprawl - in his exhibition Mecca Journeys, presenting a compelling portrait of the massive urban redevelopment underway in the holy city.

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Saudi artist Ahmed Mater presents his work on stage during the UNESCO NGO Forum in Riyadh on May ,3 2017. (Getty)

ABDULNASSER GHAREM

Saudi Artist Abdulnasser Gharem’s installation, Message/Messenger.

(Source: Christie’s)

A lieutenant colonel in the Army, Abulnasser is one of the most significant conceptual artists of his generation and one of the most important promoters of contemporary Saudi art, both in bolstering art education at home and encouraging its exhibitions abroad.

Mater’s work references heritage, but is also politically and socially astute. His art is informed by his unique interpretation of the social conditions of his home country and his direct interaction with society. Gharem chooses not to display his work in a studio, instead, he incorporates art into his day-today life, searching for opportunities for interventions in his surroundings.

In 2011, at Christie’s Modern and Contemporary Arab, Iranian and Turkish Art sale in Dubai, his piece called Message/Messenger evoked a round of applause when it was sold for 842,500$ (Dh3.09 million), making him the highest-selling living Arab artist at the time. The piece is a three-metre-wide wood and copper installation of a golden dome symbolising the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. Inside the dome was a dove.

Following his record-breaking sale at Christie’s, he cofounded the Edge of Arabia nonprofit arts organisation alongside Ahmed Mater. In 2013, he founded Gharem Studio, a nonprofit arts organisation where young Saudi artists can come to learn, create and hang out.

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Saudi Artist Abdulnasser Gharem at his solo exhibition at Edge of Arabia’s gallery space in London. (Source: Edge of Arabia)

Saudi artist Manal AlDowayan poses ahead of the opening of the exhibition 'The Future of a Promise' on June 2011 ,1 in Venice, Italy. (Getty)

MANAL ALDOWAYAN Born in Dhahran, in the East of Saudi Arabia, Manal AlDowayan is one of the most recognisable and critically acclaimed Saudi contemporary artists. While studying advanced computing (in Saudi Arabia, then Boston and London), she learnt how to shoot and develop photographs. She spent years working as an engineer at a national oil company and now devotes herself entirely to her art.

As a photographer, visual poet, and artist, her artistic practice revolves around themes of active forgetting, archives, and collective memory, with a large focus on Saudi women and their representation. She has also documented other social groups like oil men, and has addressed the impact of mass media on propagating intentional erasing of identities. Her participatory projects have attracted hundreds of women to use art as a new platform to address social issues.

Her art combines a graphic yet refined aesthetic: elegant portraits of women, neon writing, what would seem glamourous motifs, but an incongruous element will always be thrown in to disrupt the scene.

AlDowayan’s artworks are part of the permanent collections of the British Museum, the Jordan National Museum of Fine Art, the Abdul Latif Jamil Foundation, the Delfina Foundation in London, and the Barjeel Foundation in Sharja, among other prominent institutions.

Her photograph “Pointing to the Future” was exhibited in New York at the 49th Session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) in 2005 and her “I Am” series was exhibited at the Clinton Public Library in Little Rock, Arkansas as part of the Club de Madrid’s 2012 annual conference, entitled “Harnessing 21st Century Solutions: A Focus on Women.”

Saudi Artist Manal AlDowayan’s artwork, Pointing to the Future. (Source: Manal AlDowayan)

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Struggling to Sleep at Night?

Top 4 Reasons Why You›re Not Sleeping Through the Night 50

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Worries or a depressed mood may make it hard to fall asleep and stay asleep. for obesity, high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, and even premature death. That makes it important to figure out what’s interrupting your sleep.

1. IT COULD BE YOUR AGE “We see more interrupted sleep in older adults, although you shouldn’t automatically blame frequent waking on your age,” says Dr. Suzanne Bertisch, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Sometimes older adults find they wake early in the morning, when they feel they should be sleeping.

But that often reflects your schedule for sleeping and waking, not disrupted sleep.

“Your circadian rhythm, or sleep-wake cycle, may dramatically shift when you’re older, causing you to get sleepy earlier. So if 8 p.m. is the start of your ‘biologic’ night, then your natural wake time may be around 4 a.m.,” Dr. Bertisch says.

2. IT COULD BE YOUR LIFESTYLE One of the common causes of disrupted sleep is lifestyle, including any of the following habits: Drinking alcohol within four hours of bedtime.

A nightcap may help you fall asleep, but it also can interrupt sleep later in the night, and can also cause more trips to the bathroom.

College students sleeping in lecture hall. (Getty)

Harvard Health Letter Unhealthy habits and underlying conditions contribute to interrupted sleep.

The world looks sunny after a great night’s rest.

But it’s a different story when sleep is frequently interrupted. A lack of Zs makes it harder to think and easier to become irritated and anxious. In the long term, inadequate sleep increases your risk

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Eating within a few hours of bedtime. Lying down with a full stomach can promote heartburn, which makes it harder to fall asleep and stay asleep.

Napping too much. Long naps in the afternoon or later make it harder to stay asleep at night.

Consuming too much caffeine. Caffeine (in coffee, tea, and sodas) blocks a brain chemical called adenosine that helps you sleep. Go light on

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caffeine-containing foods and drinks beyond the early afternoon.

Dr. Bertisch says changing these habits can help reduce disrupted sleep, sometimes quickly.

3. IT COULD BE YOUR MEDICATION Some medications can cause night-time waking.

Examples include • some antidepressants • beta blockers to treat high blood pressure • cold remedies containing alcohol • corticosteroids to treat inflammation or asthma Dr. Bertisch recommends asking your doctor if your medication might be the culprit and if there’s a different time of day to take it or another drug that won’t interfere with your sleep.

4. IT COULD BE AN UNDERLYING CONDITION Many chronic health problems can throw a monkey wrench into a sound sleep. These are some of the most common in older age: Anxiety or depression. Worries or a depressed mood may make it hard to fall asleep and stay asleep.

Enlarged prostate gland (benign prostatic hyperplasia, or BPH). The urge to empty the bladder wakes men with BPH throughout the night.

In the long term, inadequate sleep increases your risk for obesity, high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, and even premature death.

Chronic pain. It’s hard to stay asleep when you’re hurting. “And it’s a two-way street. Sleep deprivation worsens next-day pain,” Dr. Bertisch says.

Neuropathy. Tingling, numbness, or pain in the hands and feet can cause frequent waking.

Sleep apnea. Loud snoring and brief awakenings during the night may be signs you have sleep apnea, which causes brief pauses in breathing at night and leads to daytime sleepiness.

HOW TO COPE There’s no need to live with the burden of disrupted sleep. Change your lifestyle if you feel it’s interfering with your sleep, or talk to your doctor about ways to better treat or possibly investigate underlying conditions.

And practice good sleep hygiene: • Wake up at the same time each day.

• Avoid electronic devices (which emit light and stimulate the brain) at least two hours before bed.

• Sleep in a quiet, dark, cool space.

• Get regular exercise (but not within an hour of bedtime).

If you are already practicing healthy sleep behaviors but still have trouble sleeping, consider cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-i). CBT-i is a proven way to treat insomnia through relaxation techniques, talk therapy, and adjustment of the amount of time you spend in bed. It works with your body’s natural controllers of sleep to reset the brain to achieve healthier sleep.

The good news: you can boost sleep quality and regain that sunny morning feeling. “When you sleep better,” says Dr. Bertisch, “you’re more likely to see improvements in your day-to-day function, concentration, energy levels, and quality of life.”

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A young woman stands in the bathroom falling asleep while getting ready in the morning.

(Getty)

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